I was going to title this 2017 – A Year in the Crapper and include an appropriate photo, but my friends tell me I overshare.

So, here’s my modified letter to the world:

2017 KINDA SUCKED

Like burnt-pan-of-forgotten-soup-boiled-drySUCKED.

How bad a cook am I? I burned soup, people. That’s how bad!

It took a whole year of bad things happening for me to put my finger on exactly what was wrong…

2017 – LIKE TREE-EATS-ROOF KINDA SUCKS!

Yeah, yeah. Having a tree drop on your house in a sh*t storm was a pretty big effing clue. But you could just chalk that up to really bad luck and shrug it off. If it weren’t for all those bad juju kinda things that kept happening.

I TRIED 2017. I REALLY DID.

I tried traveling to exotic locations and exploring for fun and adventure. I generally learned there is a diminishing return on happiness. The farther away we got from home, the more likely we were going to need an E.R. trip or an intervention. We are now circling the drain of 2017 and sticking mostly to home as a result.

CAMP CADILLAC – For when you finally admit tent camping isn’t for you!

My son loves to go places and sleep outdoors.

Or so I thought.

Instead, what I found was photographic evidence that my son just likes a variety of places he can write calendars–or, if not writing them, he is contemplating it with a fistful of markers or crayons awaiting his next fix.

My son discovered a love of popcorn. That was a new obsession.

This really was his primary food source in 2017

Camping meant lots of time spent popping this way.

But despite the happiness campaign the people at Orville Redenbacher are pitching, popcorn can’t fix everything.

If you squint you can make out my son’s favorite pastime. Hunting for calendars a thousand years from now.

Not even calendars can do that.

It also took me nearly a year of misery to realize something…

Gun Lake Reprieve – Momentary Bliss

Despite the occasional flashes of joy and happiness I managed to capture…

Do you have any idea how hard it was to get him NOT to eat this cookie so I could take this fuzzy image? You can’t!

In most of the photos I took of my son…he was not smiling.

Seriously, he really did love this place. But his face doesn’t show it!

He was there. But he was an unwilling participant in:

Mommy’s Campaign for Happiness and Symptom Control.

Millenium Park only reached a tepid level of joy.

If 2017 were a fairytale–it was the Hans-Christian-Andersen-dark-with-a-side-of-maniacal-laughter kind. And it would have opened with this line…

THERE ONCE WAS A HAPPY BOY…whose mother tried to address his recurring rage-outs with a wave of pharmaceutical fixes.

This was his most common expression–a mixture of Why? and Please Stop!

We tried several different combinations of psychiatric panaceas. If a drug caused a side effect, we gave a pill to fix the side effect – or in theory, that’s what it was supposed to do. Instead, it produced yet more side effects that, surprise, surprise, we’d try to address with more medication.

It was the loopiest, saddest, roller coaster of a year you can imagine.

Part of me wanted to believe this was a transition year. That turning thirteen and becoming a dreaded teenager was the root of this particular evil. But after several incidents of biting in school this fall, I decided to stop the massively medicated merry-go-round–at least in part.

We backed off the majority of his drug trials. He is back on the two drugs that have the fewest complications and I just deal with side effects that only have him crawling up the walls and not sleeping instead of the combo-platter pharmacopeia backlash that produced jittery anxiety, biting, and head bashing, among other things.

I now take comfort in momentary joys–as rare as a solar eclipse and therefore exponentially more cherished in their singularity.

Does he understand the significance of the earth’s shadow blocking the sun? I do not know. But he enjoyed a day out and that was good enough for me.

But when added up in seconds, the joys of 2017 could not outweigh the sorrows.

In this year, I have watched my happy boy transform in a downward spiral of misery and depression, taking me with him.

THERE’S NO MAP TO A HAPPY PLACE FROM HERE!

Then I had to leave my job to take care of him. Because, once he outgrew his handlers, I was the only one who could get him off the bus.

I left a good place to work for a life of uncertainty and near-poverty that allows me to work from home in the hours that my son is in school.

The only upside to this stress? I have spent less time developing an ulcer over the toilet tank of a government where The Great Evil and his Cabal of Cackling Soulless Ones are stirring a sh*t stew for the masses to swallow.

So, 2017–that’s it! I am out of it: Out of work. Out of patience. And now, out of time.

I AM DONE, 2017.

SERIOUSLY.

I AM DONE WITH YOU.

I am coasting the rest of this year and hope that 2018 has some upside that I just can’t foresee or imagine. But I doubt it.*

Asterisk Bedazzled Footnote:

*In a traditional end-of-year review, I usually take a light-hearted look at the craziness of my life. 2017 hasn’t been so much crazy-fun as it has been crazy-needs-to-be-committed. I’m not going to pretend otherwise and that’s my gift to you. Some years, all you can give is the honest truth…even if it is wrapped in a craptastic bow.**

**Seriously, though, being sick with cough and congestion this past week may have affected this year’s letter. Perhaps after I finish coughing up a lung, I’ll find my happy place again?